Be a Green Cleaning Machine

Affordable and available products and easy solutions to ensure your home is safe, green, and glorious!

Do you ever stop to think about the chemicals you’re exposing your family to every time you clean your home? Unless you make a concerted effort to buy "green" cleaning products, the odds are you’re polluting your own environment with all kinds of chemicals that you can live (better) without. In fact, some of the chemicals that are widely used in household cleaners are not allowed in the workplace because they don’t meet safety standards for the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

Logically, faced with these facts, there are only two possible courses of action; stop cleaning your home altogether (tempting, but wrong!) or at least stop using the harshest cleaning products.

Look out for chemicals like petroleum distillates in metal polishes, and nitrobenzene in some furniture polishes and formaldehyde (a preservative in many products), which is a suspected human carcinogen and an irritant to eyes, throat, skin, and lungs.

Usually, the harshest cleaners are oven, toilet bowl and drain cleaners. Here are a few alternatives:

OVEN CLEANERS

Arm and Hammer makes a nontoxic oven cleaner. You can also make your own by sprinkling a thick layer of baking soda over damp oven surfaces. Let it sit for an hour or more and then use steel wool to get the spots cleaned off.

FOR DRAINS

The best thing you can do is to regularly pour boiling water down your drain (unless you have plastic pipes—then you do NOT want to risk your pipes). The people at eartheasy.com suggest that if you do get a clog, pour half a cup of baking soda down the drain, then slowly follow it with a half cup of vinegar. Let it sit for fifteen minutes, and then flush it out with a gallon of boiling water.

SPONGES

A lot of sponges these days are treated with synthetic disinfectant chemicals like triclosan. You don’t need them. You can pop your sponge into the dishwasher or the microwave them on high power for a minute. You can also drop them into boiling water for about five minutes. Look for pure cellulose sponges.